Cyberdemon

We end our journey through the hellacious parade of Doom beasts with the biggest of them all – the dreaded Cyberdemon. This ghastly, skyscraper-esque, Minotaur cybernetic doesn’t have a left forearm – it has a super action rocket launcher instead. How handy.

The Cyberdemon is not actually the final boss of the game – that honour goes to the Spider Mastermind, who kicked off this little impromptu series here. He does, however, patrol the last level of the second episode, The Shores of Hell, set on Deimos. In a similar setup to the Baron of Hell face-off of episode one, the map Tower of Babel is brisk and quiet – and worryingly generous with armor, stimpacks and ammunition – until you enter a courtyard, and basically run right into this hideous creation. Once awoken, his strides make a booming impact on the ground – the sound of that getting nearer is something you really don’t want to hear.

Well, that’s you over.

Needless to say, if you’re caught off guard, his rocket launcher is going to see you off immediately. I’ve always thought the Cyberdemon tougher to best than the Spider Mastermind – it moved faster, was leaner and thus harder to strike at a safe distance (at least until you discovered how to ‘circle strafe’ – basically, run rings around him firing incessantly, while avoiding the rockets) and had an attack which could seriously wound you even if he didn’t actually hit you – Doom was one of the first games to factor in blast damage for explosive weapons (though the Cyberdemon, tsk, wouldn’t you know it, is immune!) It also has health of 4000%, higher than the Spider Mastermind (3000%) and indeed most of the other enemies put together, so on meeting, be prepared for one almighty onslaught.

With the defeat of the Cyberdemon comes the end of our journey to Hell – I think these four are the most iconic characters of the game. I thought I’d throw them all on a single image, just to give you some idea of the varying scales of each of the monsters covered, as the single portraits don’t necessarily do them justice:

It’s been a lot of fun revisiting a childhood staple of mine (even though it shouldn’t have been such, I know.) and it’s been an enjoyable challenge ‘upscaling’ masses of pixels into a smooth sketch. I might look at other games in the future, though I’m struggling to think of any with such an impressive cast as Doom.

• 1993
• Art
• boss
• cyberdemon
• Doom
• drawing
• game
• id software
• monster
• nostalgia
• video games